


Absolution

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 11:46:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15072485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: Set during and mostly after the "The End"/FTF/"The Beginning" arc. Mulder doesn't know what to do about Diana. Scully doesn't know what to do with herself. Much angst, eventually resolved.





	Absolution

Diana was set to make a full recovery from her gunshot wound. She called Mulder herself to tell him the news: a subtle, coercive call, aimed at drawing him to the hospital. It had been three weeks, but Mulder was still in a smoke-filled daze, a numbed fog of disbelief and anguish. All his work, in ash about his feet. He’d barely even spoken to Scully—found it hard to make eye contact with her across the bullpen where they now spent their aimless days.

The sanitized corridor was cold and familiar like the barrel of a gun: the faint whiff of danger, of misadventure, of his own mortality. He felt lead pool in his gut as he approached her door.

“Fox,” she said, brown head turning on her pillow.

“Hi, Diana.” Her hand reached out to him, and he walked to stand beside her. She slipped her cool fingers into his. “How’re you doing?”

“Much better,” she said. “I think they’ll let me out of here soon.”

He nodded, trying to conjure up some positive emotion onto his face, though he felt nothing.

“I wanted to tell you I was sorry to hear about your office, about your files.”

Mulder sighed, exhausted from expressions of sympathy that rang hollow against his powerlessness. He pulled his hand from hers and turned to sit in a chair several feet away. “Yeah, well.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help…” She was looking at him with eyes that claimed sincerity but held something else too. He didn’t have the energy to parse her intent.

A week later, some of the feeling had come back into his limbs. He and Scully drew an assignment together for once. Dallas. A bomb threat. The thought of packing his duffel, packing some heat, and hitching a ride out of Dulles with Scully by his side was enough to make him forget about Diana and her pleading, overly sincere looks that confused him with unspoken demands.

—

After Dallas and Antarctica, their sham of a hearing, the disastrous escapade in the desert, and yet another sham hearing, Diana found him again in the hallway outside his apartment. She’d been waiting.

“What are you doing here, Diana?”

“I wanted to see you,” she said. “To explain.”

“You don’t need to explain anything.” He was holding his keys, hesitant about letting her in. He glanced up and down the hallway as if someone might be watching.

“I knew what happened to you after your first hearing, so I had to be careful with my wording in my report. I didn’t want to risk that neither of us would have the files.”

“I know that,” he said, nodding. “I know why you did it.”

“But I’m also sure of what we saw.” She was looking at him so earnestly. Her hand found its way to his wrist. “Can I come in?”

He felt stretched like putty, too thin to resist. He clenched his jaw, squeezed his keys so hard he thought they might cut into his skin, then unlocked the door. She followed him into the dark apartment and almost immediately, she was touching his biceps, his neck, in gestures he thought were meant to be comforting. “We’ll have the evidence we need soon, Fox. We know the DNA from the claw mark matches Gibson’s. That’s a start. It’s only a matter of time.”

He was so distracted, unnerved, by her touching him that it took a moment to register what she’d said. “Hold on… I never told you that. How do you know about the DNA?”

She was smiling at him like an uncomprehending child. “I had the FBI lab run a test, Fox. How did you think I knew?”

Right. Of course she would, she’s on the X-Files now. He reminded himself that she knew what she was doing. And she gotten a fragment of the claw from… She must have—but he didn’t get to finish his thought because she had her hand in his hair and was pulling him toward her, kissing him without warning as she backed them toward his couch. He didn’t want this from her. Somehow, though, he couldn’t force himself to push her away. He was so confused, so tired from the last weeks, and everything he did felt wrong. What was he doing? What was  _she_  doing?

Diana shoved him onto the couch and straddled his legs. He gripped her shoulders to push her back, but she only took this as encouragement. She was insistent, and he was weak. It had been so long since anyone had touched him this way, and though he wasn’t interested in her, he’d never been good at rejecting strong women. They tended to grab hold of him wherever they could and drag him along until he was worn out, then toss him in the gutter.

His thoughts went to Scully, then, who was in many ways the opposite of the women he’d been drawn to in his past. Scully, who spent so much of her time pulling him  _out_  of gutters, brushing him off, and getting him back on solid ground. Scully, whom he could feel slipping away, even at this moment…

—

The scene had played out much like her actual nightmares: being compared to Diana and found wanting, treated like a jealous harpy, denied and disbelieved.

“It comes down to a matter of trust,” Scully had said—so carefully, trying not to let tears come into her eyes. He’d turned to face her, defiant, breaking her heart. “I guess it always has.”

He’d looked away momentarily, fidgeting with the papers on his desk before turning those eyes on her again. “You’re asking me to make a choice?”

“I’m asking you to trust my judgment… to trust me,” she’d said, and despite all his words, despite the literal ends of the earth he’d gone to, he’d refused to accept her at her word until she told him what he wanted to hear. When he finally took the folder from her and listened, she had known: it was not her, at all, that he trusted or wanted, but only her belief in him, her loyal footsteps half a stride behind his (never leading, never choosing), her validation that helped “his” work stand. He would offer her no room to slip up, no grace should she falter in his expectations.

The words he’d spoken, just moments earlier, still ached like knives in her heart, telling her his choice had already been made:  _And no matter what you think, she’s certainly not going to go around saying that just because science can’t prove it, it isn’t true_.

So that’s what he thought of her. Had his other words been lies, then? Those earlier words of need, of completion, that had sounded so much like love? Selfish lies to bind her to him, she realized now. He didn’t want to do this alone, he’d said. The partner who filled the slot against loneliness, she supposed, was arbitrary. Perhaps he’d do better with someone who told him what he wanted to hear, who stabbed him in the back and called it loyalty, who rubbed her breasts against his arm while she looked at a case file over his shoulder. Who called him  _Fox_.

She’d explained the connection she found, her DNA revelation, but she’d been on the verge of tears the whole time. Now, hours later, she sat in a car outside his apartment and thought about what she really wanted. After much contemplation, she decided that mostly what she wanted was not to feel this way anymore. She wanted the joy and excitement of their early years back, the sense of setting off together on a great adventure. And barring that, she wanted the freedom to turn away, to let go her losses and angle her steps again toward the sun without being thought a traitor. She’d meant what she said: her quitting would be a kind of forfeiture, and all her suffering would be swallowed into the abyss of the past, unavenged. But what justice lay ahead if she were held voiceless like some barely tolerated sidekick? Either she rolled over and bared her belly when she was told, like a good girl, or she was a traitorous betrayer who let the bad guys win.

So here she was again, hands on the steering wheel, wet eyes, and no answers about what to do. She came to make peace. She came to talk to the only person who might understand. She came to see her friend, if he would still call her that, and beg absolution. If he would not choose her, all of her, he would have to let her go.

Scully steeled herself with a deep breath and a quick shake of the head before opening the car door. In his hallway, that fateful corridor, she raised her hand to knock before noticing that the door was not quite closed. Worried, she pushed it open.

“Mulder?” Her hand was at her hip, already tugging at her weapon as she adjusted her eyes to the dim light of the apartment. There was a muffled sound from his couch. Two voices. Scully took a few steps in.

And then she saw them.

Diana Fowley was wrapped around him like a spider, hands in his hair and lips on his mouth. Scully wanted to cry out, but instead a gust of air left her lips in a _whuff_ , as if she’d been gut-punched.

Across the darkened room, Mulder’s eyes found her and went wide. He pushed Diana back, pulled her hands from his face, and stared with such dumbfounded confusion. “Scully.”

Diana’s head snapped around and she eyed the other woman: irritation laced with a touch of smugness. “Oh,” she said, as if disappointed rather than surprised.

“I—“ Scully faltered. “I’m sorry, Mulder, I… I’m sorry.” She stumbled backward toward the door, heart thudding, blind with tears already as she pushed past his door and back out into the hall.

“Scully, wait!” she heard him call out behind her, followed by a muffled “Fuck.”

She was jabbing at the elevator’s down button and she refused to turn, though she could hear his footsteps approaching. If this was his absolution, her answer was clear. He’d found his better better-half and she was free to go. Perhaps she could scramble together something of a life without him, some calm existence with only half her heart—after she’d scrambled together her remaining dignity, that was.

“Scully.” His voice was softer now. She felt his hand on her arm, but shook it off. She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t let him see the tears that she couldn’t seem to stop crying. She deserved to hold onto at least some small thread of pride. “Please,” he said.

“No,” she managed to croak. The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. Scully stepped inside and pushed the G button without turning, but of course Mulder held the doors open, held her there against her will.

“Dana—“

At this, she finally whipped around, anger overtaking her shame and heartache. “No!” she barked. “You don’t get to call me that. You don’t get to reel me back in with lies about how I make you a whole person or how you give a goddamn about any part of me except what’s useful to you.” Behind him she saw Diana’s head peer out of his doorway, and her anger sharpened, crystallized into a focused point. She shoved his chest, and he stumbled back from the elevator’s entrance.

“I’m leaving,” she said. “You’ll be fine.” The twin doors came together and she lost sight of his stunned, crestfallen face.

—

Mulder slumped back to his apartment doorway like a wounded dog. Diana met him there with those hands, again, on his arms. “Fox, what happened?”

He couldn’t even look at her, but pushed her hands away from him. “Go home, Diana.”

Her hands went to her hips as her spine stiffened. “Is that how you treat me now?”

He glared at her. “This isn’t what I want. You know it’s not. Please go home.”

Haughty, her chin in the air. “Fox, she doesn’t even believe you. Not like I do.”

He was teetering at the edge of something dangerous, his fists clenched at his sides, everything in him boiling under the pressure. His first impulse was to lash out in defense of Scully, but that would be playing Diana’s game. Instead he just said, “Go,” with such intensity that she wavered on her feet.

“Well,” she said. “You know where to find me.”

He closed the door behind her, hard, then collapsed onto his couch with his head in his hands. It was a very very long night.

—

Scully took a sick day to get her things in order, to compose a careful letter of resignation, and to think about what she actually wanted to do with her life. It took her six years to get into this mess, but surely she’d be able to figure a way out of it in one day, right? Instead she spent most of her time slumped on the couch drinking tea (with a generous splash of whiskey) and watching game shows. She was in a tipsy fog by lunchtime, still in her pajamas, half-heartedly debating ordering a pizza.  _Welcome to the rest of your life, Dana_. She hadn’t felt this bad in years.

She picked up the phone to order, but there was a knock at her door. She looked at the phone, momentarily confused, as if the mere thought of ordering pizza had somehow conjured it to her. With some reluctance, she extricated herself from the nest of pillows and blankets she’d forged over the course of the morning.

The peephole: Mulder.

“Go ‘way, Mulder,” she said, and started back to the couch.

“Scully, let me in. Please.”

“No.”

She heard the key in the lock, but continued taking her place on the couch. She turned up the TV and took another sip of her spiked English Breakfast. “Go away,” she said again, but he wouldn’t. He sat in the chair nearest the couch.

“Scully.” Pleading. She wouldn’t look at him. “Scully, we need to talk about this.”

She pretended to be interested in  _The Young and the Restless_. “I don’t think so.”

Mulder swiped a frustrated hand over his face. “So what, then, you’re gonna sit around watching soap operas until it’s time to move to Boise or Birmingham? You’re gonna become a pathologist at a hospital in some bumfuck town we’ve passed through 20 times and never talk to me again?”

She kept her eyes on the TV. “I’ll get a dog, name him Scalpel. Crochet ugly hats on the weekends and pine for you, Mulder.” She meant this last part as a joke, but felt the knife twist in her gut when the words came out—it probably wasn’t so far off.

“Jesus, Scully. Is it so easy for you to give up?”

Now she did look at him, eyes hard and glassy. “Easy? Fuck you, Mulder. You have no idea.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his thighs, and took the remote from her. He turned off the TV, looked at her hard. “Then tell me,” he said. “What did you come to talk to me about?”

Those droopy eyes, the stubble on his chin, his rumpled clothes—he looked rough, she realized. Good. “I came to tell you how terrible I felt. How trapped.” The whiskey had loosened her tongue, and her emotions too. Already she felt those damned tears coming to her eyes, the ones she never seemed able to shut off when they talked like this.

“Trapped how?” he asked.

“Trapped with you. Bound to this work, which I do care about, which I do love, but held to it in a way that always puts me second. I’m tired of being an afterthought, Mulder.”

“You’re not.”

“I am.” She was tucking her legs up, pulling herself into a fetal position, further from him on the far edge of the couch. “The truth, whatever that means, is always first for you, Mulder. Your need for answers outweighs everything else, including me. That worked for us for a while, especially when those answers were bound up in what had happened to me. But things have changed in the last year, and I can’t live with feeling like this anymore, like if I don’t snap to your heel when you call, I don’t matter. It’s not fair. You mean more to me than the answers, more than the work,” she said. “Can you say the same thing about me?”

“Of course I—“

“Think about it, Mulder.” Her eyes were steely and resolved, despite their wet shine. She had thought this through. “I want the answers. I do. I want justice for those who deserve it, and I would love to go on solving all the impossible cases with you until we’re too old to shoot straight or run down a suspect.” Here she took a deep breath. Took a leap. “But more than those things, I want you. I want you alive. I want you whole. I want you sane… I want you with me, in every way that matters. But it’s become pretty clear that’s not what you want.” A hard swallow. Her throat was so dry. “So if I can’t have that, I need to get out, because it hurts too much to stay.” She was hugging her knees tightly now and had never felt more exposed, more vulnerable. Mulder’s thumb had gone to his mouth where he chewed on the nail. She saw that his eyes were wet now, too.

“I’m so sorry, Scully.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. “I’m so sorry you had to think that because it’s not true at all.” He reached a hand out and found her socked foot, entangled with a blanket. He squeezed it, and she felt it all the way up into her chest. “For so long, I’ve thought that the work was the only thing that kept you with me. I thought that without it, without needing the answers about what happened to you, you would have left me years ago. And that’s one thing I couldn’t stand.” His finger, tracing the top of her foot; his eyes, tracing their way up to hers. “I can’t be without you, Scully. And I meant everything I said in that hallway.”

They were both red-nosed now. She moved her feet and patted beside her for him to sit. He did, without hesitation. “What about Diana?” she asked.

He was chewing his bottom lip; fidgeting. “She cares about the work, I think. Some part of it. But not about me. For her, I’m just a means to an end.”

“You were kissing her… more than kissing her.”

“No,” he said, adamant. “She was kissing me. I was stupid and too weak to push her away.”

There was a pause. “Did she stay?” At his apartment, she meant. He understood.

“No. Of course not.”

Scully nodded. “I know you know this, but I don’t trust her. She manipulates you so easily, Mulder, and it hurts me when you don’t trust my judgment.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just… hard to accept that I could be wrong about her. That she could have changed so much. And it’s nice to feel wanted.”

“Mulder.” Her bottom lip was trembling so she sucked it between her teeth for a moment. “I’ve been right here the whole time, wanting you.”

He looked at her with such overwhelming intensity, the same way he’d looked at her in his hallway not so long ago. “I know that now,” he said.

“And what about what you want?”

His hand moved slowly, tentatively, to push a piece hair back from her face. His thumb stayed at her cheek, grazing gently. “I want my partner. I want you, Scully, with me always.”

She leaned her cheek into his palm, the warmth of the whiskey and the relief of his words uncoiling the tension of her muscles. She uncoiled her body as well, straightening up, soft blankets tumbling to the floor as her feet came down and she inched toward him. When he looked at her that way, she believed him—she couldn’t help it. It’s why she’d pushed him away last night. “Don’t treat me like a traitor,” she whispered against his skin. He was pulling her face closer to his, their movements toward each other like the slow, inevitable drift of tectonic plates.

“Swear to me you’ll never leave,” he whispered back, just before his lips touched hers. She answered with her flesh: with her tongue against his bottom lip, fingers in his hair, nails gracing his scalp with such care as he kissed her fully and she kissed him back. His hand came to the t-shirt at her back, the one she’d worn to Maine, and warmed her spine just above the tattoo—her reminder not to let herself be taken for granted. He would remember, too.

She drowned in the taste of him, in the relief of his admission, in the pure, overwhelming weight of him against her finally. He angled her back into the cushions so they were torso-to-torso, both in their rumpled clothes and hair. This was not the dramatic, vivid declaration of his hallway a month ago. This was the quiet urgency of two people who had sunk down to the bottom-most places of themselves, the shadowed corners of who they might be without the armor of their work, and found each other. Here was the unstoppable rush of a desperate ache relieved, of a love that reached out, at last, and found itself requited.

“I promise,” he murmured into her breast, fingers gliding beneath fabric to touch skin that arched toward him.

Naked, they came together fully on her couch in the bright sunlight of mid-day. “I promise,” she whispered as he entered her, and in this sweet, afternoon pajama-love that followed their darkest evening, she realized they had said their vows.

 

\----

Thank you for reading! This was written in response to a handful of tumblr prompts and grew into something else. I'd love to hear what you think.

tumblr: spookydarlablack


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